KAMPOS by daylight was a hot, characterless little town and we were glad to leave. While we waited for the bus in the market-place, the Deep Maniot with the sorrowful countenance came loping towards us under his giant Mambrino’s helmet of straw. He produced a clean blue handkerchief in which some plums and greengages were knotted. Peeling them carefully with a jack-knife, he dropped them into glasses of retsina to cool and then offered them in turn impaled on a fork. There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little forethought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one’s elbow by ravens. Our benefactor was in the throes of acute melancholia. He hated living in Kampos among all these half-baked Vlachs. He spoke once more of the Deep Mani as a longed-for and unobtainable Canaan. Why didn’t he live there? “Don’t ask,” he said, and made that tired circular gesture with his open hand suggesting a piling up of complications on which it was too tedious and vexatious to embark. “Troubles...” he said. It occurred to me that he was perhaps involved in one of the feuds for which the Mani is notorious and had fled to these alien lowlands for refuge.
“You ought to be there in the autumn,” he said, “when the quails fly over in millions. We spread nets and set traps for them and roast them on spits.... If you gave me your address in London and if God grants me life till the autumn I could get my niece down there to fill up a great can with quails in oil for you to eat as a mézé in London.... We could seal it up at the top with a soldering iron....”
The bus rattled us along a switchback road above the Messenian Gulf. Twice everybody had to dismount and negotiate bad bits of road, until, after an hour, we came in sight of Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea. Several towers and a cupola and a belfry rose above the roofs and a ledge immediately above them formed a lovely cypress-covered platform. Above this the bare Taygetus piled up.
It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church. The mountains rushed down almost to the water’s edge with, here and there among the whitewashed fishermen’s houses near the sea, great rustling groves of calamus reed ten feet high and all swaying together in the slightest whisper of wind. There was sand underfoot and nets were looped from tree to tree. Whitewashed ribbed amphorae for oil or wine, almost the size of those dug up in the palace of Minos, stood by many a doorway. Once more I wondered how these immense vessels were made. They are obviously too big for any potter smaller than a titan with arms two yards long. As usual, theories abound. Some say a man gets inside the incipient jar like a robber in the Arabian Nights, and builds up the expanding and tapering walls as they rotate on a great wheel; some, that the halves are constructed separately and then put together; others that they are cast in huge moulds; yet others assert that they are built up from a rope of clay that is paid out in an expanding and then a contracting coil until the final circle of the rim is complete; which is made to account for the ribs and the fluting that gird them from top to bottom....I had heard, all over Greece, that they came from Coroni in the Messenian peninsula, only the other side of the gulf. It was strange that, even here, there should be such a conflict of solutions. There were only four men in the little group I asked among the beached fishing boats. If there had been more, no doubt the total of solutions would have risen accordingly.[1]
For the first time,—in conversation, and over the very few shops,—I became aware of one of the typical Maniot name-endings, one which is found nowhere else in Greece: Koukéas, Phaliréas, Tavoularéas, and so on. The last of these was the name of the schoolmaster, a charming and erudite man, who told us of the vanished temple of the nereids built there to commemorate the time the sea-nymphs came ashore to gaze at Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles—or Neoptolemos as he is called in Homer—when he set off for his wedding with Andromache’s rival, Hermione. The church, dedicated to the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, now occupies the site. There was a marble rosette in the centre of the floor under which a dowser, some years previously, had divined the presence of gold in large quantities a few metres down; perhaps gold ornaments in some pre-Christian tomb. Strangely, nobody had got busy with crowbars.... In a little room in the schoolhouse was a rose antique funerary slab with a beautifully incised epitaph in Hellenistic characters commemorating the great love and respect that all his contemporaries felt for the deceased, “the Ephebe Sosicles the Lacedaemonian.” The inscription ended with a delicate curved loop of knotted and fluttering ribbon. Above the village, in the burning and cactus-covered hillside, he pointed out two rectangular troughs hacked out of the rock: the graves, after all their vicissitudes, of Castor and Pollux; or so it was thought...they looked far too short for the great boxer and his horse-breaking twin whose constellations shine in the sky alternately. Further on a dark cistern was hewn in the mountain-side surmounted by a roughly carved lion’s head and, yet further, hard by the golden church lay the castellated remains of a fort with dungeons and barred windows and rough-hewn staircases. The little castle and the church, we were told, were built by one of the descendants of the Palaeologi who had sought refuge here from the Turks after the fall of Mistra in 1461.
A large bell, green with verdigris, embossed with an effigy of a Catholic bishop with mitre and crosier and the legend that it was the “gift of the heirs of the de Bolis family,” hung in the belfry,—a present, perhaps, from the Venetians when the Maniots were their allies against the Turks; or loot from a pirate-raid. The schoolmaster said that Kolokotronis, when he was here with his klephts before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (for it was here that he foregathered with Mavromichalis and the Maniot leaders before attacking the Turkish garrison in Kalamata: the first act of the war after the standard of revolt was raised at the Monastery of Kalavryta on the 25th March, 1821), would play games of human chess in this very courtyard. The flagstones were chalked out like a board and his pallikars took up their positions in squares—I hope in the cool of the evening—while Kolokotronis, in his kilt and his fabulous fireman’s helmet, would stand on the wall and shout the moves, his opponent doing the same at the other end. The loser was condemned to take the victor for a ride on pick-a-back.
It was a varied morning’s exploration.
* * *
I was alerted and fascinated by the schoolmaster’s mention of the Palaeologi, the reigning dynasty during the twilight of the Byzantine Empire. The last emperor—Constantine XI Palaeologus Vatatses—died fighting in the breach on the day the imperial city was captured by Mohammed II. In another book[2] I have told the story of the tomb of Ferdinando Palaeologus in Barbados, whose granddaughter, Godscall Palaeologue, vanishes from historic record as a little orphan girl in Stepney or Wapping, her father having died at Corunna in 1692. Her imperial descent is based on the supposition that the emperor was survived by a third brother, a shadowy figure called John, as well as by the historically verified Thomas and Demetrius, joint despots of Mistra. There is no point in retracing here the slender putative thread of his line through Italy, Holland, Cornwall, Barbados, Spain and the East End of London. If John existed, which is open to question, this little girl may have been the last imperial princess of the house of Palaeologue. Alas, at the end of the seventeenth century she disappeared forever into the mists and fogs of the London Docks.
It is the belief of the Maniots, the schoolmaster told me, that the Maniots descend in part from the ancient Spartans and in part from the Byzantines of the Peloponnese, both of them having sought refuge from their respective conquerors in these inexpugnable mountains; in the same way that many of the Byzantine families of Athens sought asylum in the isle of Ae-gina. (As we shall see later, there is a certain amount of colour to both these claims.) The founder of the church and the fortified building, I was told, was a member of the Mourtzinos family, who were reputed to be descendants of the Palaeologues. The Mourtzini were a prominent family, and one of them—Michael Troupakis Mourtzinos—was the Bey of the Mani (a virtually independent prince, that is) from 1779 until 1782, when he was beheaded by the Sultan.
* * *
Here I must anticipate a few weeks. Some days after this, in the Deep Mani, a young man gave me the name of his uncle, Mr. Dimitri Dimitrakos-Messisklis, the Athenian publisher, who, he said, had written a book about the Mani. Back in Athens, I sought him out above his bookshop, discovering him at last up a steep flight of stairs: a learned and delightful elderly gentleman in a long cavern of books overlooking Constitution Square. Over coffee we talked about the customs and the history of the Mani, and his discoveries corroborated, amended and increased the information I had by then accumulated about the towers and the blood-feuds and the dirges. How remote, as the traffic roared below us, that stony wilderness already seemed!
When I left, he presented me with a copy of his book.[3] It is a wonderfully complete account of the Mani, its history and legends and topography and folklore; a model for county-historians anywhere. Here, in the part devoted to the Beys of the Mani, he sets down the traditional genealogy of the Troupakis-Mourtzinos family. The beginnings are far shakier than those of the Cornwall-Barbados-Wapping Palaeologi. The first one mentioned is a Michael Palaeologus in 1482, only twenty-nine years after the capture of the City, descendant of a branch, it seems, of the Palaeologi of Mistra, who had three sons: Panayioti, Dimitri and Tzanetto. The descendants of Panayioti were known by the surname of Troupaki, either, the book states, because they defended themselves from an ambush by taking up positions in a hole—trypa, or, in dialect, troupa—or because these shadowy Palaeologi, escaping from Mistra through the gorges of the Taygetus to the Mani, hid from the pursuing Turks in remote grottoes, where, like troglodytes, they lived for years.... Finally, when the coast was clear, they all settled in Kardamyli. The nickname stuck and the imperial surname fell into disuse.... The next of the family to be mentioned (perhaps the intervening names have been omitted as they are of little interest to the general reader) is the ruling Bey already mentioned: Michael, whose name of Troupakis is now augmented by Mourtzinos,[4] another nickname, the dialect diminutive of mourgos, a bulldog; the complete name now meaning, roughly, Bullpup-in-the-Hole. The Bey’s son, Panayioti Mourtzinos, was Kapetan, or guerrilla leader, of Androuvitza; his son, Dionysios Mourtzinos, became war-minister of Greece in 1830. George Mourtzinos, the last of the descendants of Michael the Bey, died in 1848.
By normal standards, this is, to say the least, a shaky pedigree; especially at the beginning: those three phantom Palaeologi.... But, just supposing they were verifiable, the rest, even allowing for the gap which seems to precede Michael the Bey, might be authentic. Not only were there no genealogists under the Turkish occupation, but no archives or records, not even a parish register of births and deaths, till a very late date. It is only in the Ionian islands, which were under the Venetians, and among the Phanariot families that reigned in the Danubian Principalities, that Greek family records were kept; and, in those unchronicled centuries of oppression and turmoil and massacre and guerrilla warfare, oral tradition was the only link with time past. Fallible as it is, exposed to every rumour and misapprehension and post-facto accommodation, this is not always as unreliable as it might be supposed. There are many cases where, in the teeth of all likelihood and logical supposition, it has been proved right.
But I knew nothing about the Mourtzini at the time; nothing beyond the tradition that the former inhabitants of the castellated dwelling, the founders of the church, were popularly supposed to have been direct descendants of the Palaeologi....
* * *
The quiet charm of Kardamyli grew with each passing hour. Most unexpectedly, we discovered a little hotel consisting of a few rooms over a grocer’s shop owned by Socrates Phaliréas, the cousin, it turned out, of a distinguished sculptor-friend in Athens. Equally unexpectedly, it was, in its unflamboyant way, very comfortable. No planks were spread here with hair-shirt blankets for a stylite’s penance, but springs and soft mattresses and a wicker chair or two waited for tired limbs in old and mellow rooms; and the kind, deep voice of the gigantic owner, a civilized and easy-going host, sitting down now and then for a chat, induced in all such a lack of hurry that the teeth of time and urgency and haste seemed all to have been drawn.
The same leisurely spell pervades the whole of this far-away little town. Cooled in summer by the breeze from the gulf, the great screen of the Taygetus shuts out intruding winds from the north and the east; no tramontana can reach it. It is like those Elysian confines of the world where Homer says that life is easiest for men; where no snow falls, no strong winds blow nor rain comes down, but the melodious west wind blows for ever from the sea to bring coolness to those who live there. I was very much tempted to become one of them, to settle in this small hotel for months with books and writing-paper; the thought has often recurred. The Guide Bleu only spares it half a line, mentioning little beyond the existence of its four hundred and ninety inhabitants. It is better so. It is too inaccessible and there is too little to do there, fortunately, for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism. No wonder the nereids made it their home.
Returning from a long bathe beyond the forest of reeds, we saw a boy carrying a large silver fish by the tail: a salpa. (I haven’t discovered its usual name.) I bought it, and, while it was being cooked, we sat under a mulberry tree, whose trunk was whitewashed right up to the start of the branches, on a terrace outside one of the few taverns. Like us, a few fishermen under their great hats were watching the sun sinking over the Messenian mountains, on the other side of which, sixteen leagues away, lay Pylos. A miniature mole ran out, and, alongside it, gently rocking with each sigh of the green transparent water, caiques were tethered a few yards above their shadows on the pebbly bottom. Oleanders leaned over a flat layer of rock across which the sea flowed with just enough impetus to net the surface with a frail white reticulation of foam which slid softly away and dissolved while a new one formed. A small distance from the shore rocks jutted, one bearing a whitewashed church, the other a miniature ruined fort. The sea’s surface was striped with gold which turned as the sun dipped into pale sulphur shot with lilac. Beyond it the unruffled gulf sailed unhindered to the darkening peninsula opposite.
Thinking of our grilling fish, our minds strayed back to Kalamata (now hidden at the gleaming gulf’s end), several years before.
It was midsummer in that glaring white town, and the heat was explosive. Some public holiday was in progress—could it have been the feast of St. John the Baptist which marks the summer solstice?—and the waterfront was crowded with celebrating citizens in liquefaction. The excitement of a holiday and the madness of a heat wave hung in the air. The stone flags of the water’s edge, where Joan and Xan Fielding and I sat down to dinner, flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. On a sudden, silent, decision we stepped down fully dressed into the sea carrying the iron table a few yards out and then our three chairs, on which, up to our waists in cool water, we sat round the neatly laid table-top, which now seemed by magic to be levitated three inches above the water. The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler’s gravity, and, saying nothing more than “Dinner-time,” placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbow... Diverted by this spectacle, the diners on the quay sent us can upon can of retsina till the table was crowded. A dozen boats soon gathered there, the craft radiating from the table’s circumference like the petals of a marguerite. Leaning from their gently rocking boats, the fishermen helped us out with this sudden flux of wine, and by the time the moon and the Dog-Star rose over this odd symposium, a mandoline had appeared and manga songs in praise of hashish rose into the swooning night:
“When the hookah glows and bubbles,”
wailed the fishermen,
“Brothers, not a word! Take heed!
“Behold the mangas all around us
“Puffing at the eastern weed...”
* * *
I woke up thinking of the Mourtzini and the Palaeologi. It occurred to me, drinking mountain-tea in the street, that I had clean forgotten to ask when the Mourtzinos family had died out. “But it hasn’t,” Mr. Phaliréas said. “Strati, the last of them, lives just down the road.”
Evstratios Mourtzinos was sitting in his doorway weaving, out of split cane and string, a huge globular fish-trap more complex than any compass design or abstract composition of geometrical wire. The reel of twine revolved on the floor, the thread unwinding between his big toe and its neighbour as the airy sphere turned and shifted in his skilful brown fingers with a dazzling interplay of symmetrical parabolas. The sunlight streamed through the rust-coloured loops and canopies of drying nets. A tang of salt, tar, seaweed and warm cork hung in the air. Cut reeds were stacked in sheaves, two canaries sung in a cage in the rafters, our host’s wife was slicing onions into a copper saucepan. Mourtzinos shrugged his shoulders with a smile at my rather absurd questions and his shy and lean face, which brine and the sun’s glare had cured to a deep russet, wore an expression of dubious amusement. “That’s what they say,” he said, “but we don’t know anything about it. They are just old stories....” He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish: there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early-morning drinking in Greece.
Old stories, indeed. But supposing every link were verified, each shaky detail proved? Supposing this modest and distinguished looking fisherman were really heir of the Palaeologi, descendant of Constantine XI and of Michael VIII the Liberator, successor to Alexis Comnène and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer and Leo the Isaurian and Justinian and Theodosius and St. Constantine the Great? And, for that matter, to Diocletian and Heliogabalus and Marcus Aurelius, to the Antonines, the Flavians, the Claudians and the Julians, all the way back to the Throne of Augustus Caesar on the Palatine, where Romulus had laid the earliest foundations of Rome?... The generous strength of a second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations. It was just the face for a constitutional monarch, if only Byzantium were free. For the sheer luxury of credulity I lulled all scepticism to sleep and, parallel to an unexacting discourse of currents and baits and shoals, a kind of fairy-tale began assembling in my mind: “Once upon a time, in a far-away land, a poor fisherman and his wife lived by the sea-shore.... One day a stranger from the city of Byzantium knocked on the door and begged for alms. The old couple laid meat and drink before him...’ Here the mood and period painlessly changed into a hypothetic future and the stranger had a queer story to tell: the process of Westernization in Turkey, the study of European letters, of the classics and the humanities had borne such fruit that the Turks, in token of friendship and historical appropriateness, had decided to give the Byzantine Empire back to the Greeks and withdraw to the Central Asian steppes beyond the Volga from which they originally came, in order to plant their newly-won civilization in the Mongol wilderness.... The Greeks were streaming back into Constantinople and Asia Minor. Immense flotillas were dropping anchor off Smyrna and Adana and Halicarnassus and Alexandretta. The seaboard villages were coming back to life; joyful concourses of Greeks were streaming into Adrianople, Rhodosto, Broussa, Nicaea, Caesaraea, Iconium, Antioch and Trebizond. The sound of rejoicing rang through eastern Thrace and banners with the Cross and the double-headed eagle and the Four Betas back-to-back were fluttering over Cappadocia and Karamania and Pontus and Bithynia and Paphlagonia and the Taurus mountains....
But in the City itself, the throne of the Emperors was vacant....
Stratis, our host, had put the fish-trap on the ground to pour out a third round of ouzo. Mrs. Mourtzinos chopped up an octopus-tentacle and arranged the cross-sections on a plate. Stratis, to illustrate his tale, was measuring off a distance by placing his right hand in the crook of his left elbow, “a grey mullet that long,” he was saying, “weighing five okas if it weighed a dram....”
Then, in the rebuilt palace of Blachernae, the search for the heir had begun. What a crackling of parchment and chrysobuls, what clashing of seals and unfolding of scrolls! What furious wagging of beards and flourishes of scholarly forefingers! The Cantacuzeni, though the most authenticated of the claimants, were turned down; they were descendants only from the last emperor but four.... Dozens of doubtful Palaeologi were sent packing...the Stephanopoli de Comnène of Corsica, the Melissino-Comnènes of Athens were regretfully declined. Tactful letters had to be written to the Argyropoli; a polite firmness was needed, too, with the Courtney family of Powderham Castle in Devonshire, kinsmen of Pierre de Courtenai, who, in 1218, was Frankish Emperor of Constantinople; and a Lascaris maniac from Saragossa was constantly hanging about the gates.... Envoys returned empty-handed from Barbados and the London docks.... Some Russian families allied to Ivan the Terrible and the Palaeologue Princess Anastasia Tzarogorodskaia had to be considered.... Then all at once a new casket of documents came to light and a foreign emissary was despatched hot foot to the Peloponnese; over the Taygetus to the forgotten hamlet of Kardamyli.... By now all doubt had vanished. The Emperor Eustratius leant forward to refill the glasses with ouzo for the fifth time. The Basilissa shooed away a speckled hen which had wandered indoors after crumbs. On a sunny doorstep, stroking a marmalade cat, sat the small Diadoch and Despot of Mistra.
Our host heaved a sigh... “The trouble with dyes made from pine-cones,” he went on—“the ordinary brown kind—is that the fish can see the nets a mile off. They swim away! But you have to use them or the twine rots in a week. Now, the new white dyes in Europe would solve all that! But you would hunt in vain for them in the ships’ chandlers of Kalamata and Gytheion....”
The recognition over, the rest seemed like a dream. The removal of the threadbare garments, the donning of the cloth-of-gold dalmatics, the diamond-studded girdles, the purple cloaks. All three were shod with purple buskins embroidered with bicephalous eagles, and when the sword and the sceptre had been proffered and the glittering diadem with its hanging pearls, the little party descended to a waiting ship. The fifth ouzo carried us, in a ruffle of white foam, across the Aegean archipelago and at every island a score of vessels joined the convoy. By the time we entered the Hellespont, it stretched from Troy to Sestos and Abydos...on we went, past the islands of the shining Propontis until, like a magical city hanging in mid-air, Constantinople appeared beyond our bows, its towers and bastions glittering, its countless domes and cupolas bubbling among pinnacles and dark sheaves of cypresses, all of them climbing to the single great dome topped with the flashing cross that Constantine had seen in a vision on the Milvian bridge. There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of a mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium: the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastocrators, the Grand Logothete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the Palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylax, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts and the cataphracts; the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Asian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch, and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and Armenia, the Exarchs of Ravenna and Carthage, the Nomarch of Tarentum, the Catapan of Bari, the Abbot of Studium. As a reward for bringing good tidings, I had by this time assumed the Captaincy of the Varangian Guard; and there they were, beyond the galleons and the quinqueremes, in coruscating ranks of winged helmets, clashing their battle-axes in homage; you could tell they were Anglo-Saxons by their long thick plaits and their flaxen whiskers.... Bells clanged. Semantra hammered and cannon thundered as the Emperor stepped ashore; then, with a sudden reek of naphtha, Greek fire roared saluting in a hundred blood-red parabolas from the warships’ brazen beaks. As he passed through the Golden Gate a continual paean of cheering rose from the hordes which darkened the battlement of the Theodosian Walls. Every window and roof-top was a-bristle with citizens and as the great company processed along the purple-carpeted street from the Arcadian to the Amastrian Square, I saw that all the minarets had vanished.... We crossed the Philadelphia and passed under the Statue of the Winds. Now, instead of the minarets, statuary crowded the skyline. A population of ivory and marble gleamed overhead and, among the fluttering of a thousand silken banners, above the awnings and the crossed festoons of olive-leaves and bay, the sky was bright with silver and gold and garlanded chryselephantine.... Each carpeted step seemed to carry us into a denser rose-coloured rain of petals softly falling.
The heat had become stifling. In the packed square of Constantine, a Serbian furrier fell from a roof-top and broke his neck; an astrologer from Ctesiphon, a Spanish coppersmith and a money-lender from the Persian Gulf were trampled to death; a Bactrian lancer fainted, and, as we proceeded round the Triple Delphic Serpent of the Hippodrome, the voices of the Blues and the Greens, for once in concord, lifted a long howl of applause. The Imperial horses neighed in their stables, the hunting cheetahs strained yelping at their silver chains. Mechanical gold lions roared in the throne room, gold birds on the jewelled branches of artificial trees set up a tinkling and a twitter. The general hysteria penetrated the public jail: in dark cells, monophysites and bogomils and iconoclasts rattled their fetters across the dungeon bars. High in the glare on his Corinthian capital, a capering stylite, immobile for three decades, hammered his calabash with a wooden spoon....
Mrs. Mourtzinos spooned a couple of onions and potatoes out of the pot, laid them before us and sprinkled them with a pinch of rock salt. “When we were a couple of hours off Ce-rigo,” Stratis observed, splashing out the ouzo, “the wind grew stronger—a real meltemi—a roaring boucadoura!—so we hauled the sails down, and made everything fast....”
There, before the great bronze doors of St. Sophia, gigantic in his pontificalia, stood Athenagoras the Oecumenical Patriarch, whom I saw a few months before in the Phanar; surrounded now with all the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the East, the Holy Synod and all the pomp of Orthodoxy in brocade vestments of scarlet and purple and gold and lilac and sea blue and emerald green: a forest of gold pastoral staves topped with their twin coiling serpents, a hundred yard-long beards cascading beneath a hundred onion-mitres crusted with gems; and, as in the old Greek song about the City’s fall, the great fane rang with sixty clanging bells and four hundred gongs, with a priest for every bell and a deacon for every priest. The procession advanced, and the coruscating penumbra, the flickering jungle of hanging lamps and the bright groves and the undergrowth of candles swallowed them. Marble and porphyry and lapis-lazuli soared on all sides, a myriad glimmering haloes indicated the entire mosaic hagiography of the Orient and, high above, suspended as though on a chain from heaven and ribbed to its summit like the concavity of an immense celestial umbrella, floated the golden dome. Through the prostrate swarm of his subjects and the fog of incense the imperial theocrat advanced to the iconostasis. The great basilica rang with the anthem of the Cherubim and as the Emperor stood on the right of the Katholikon and the Patriarch on the left, a voice as though from an archangel’s mouth sounded from the dome, followed by the fanfare of scores of long shafted trumpets, while across Byzantium the heralds proclaimed the Emperor Eustratius, Servant of God, King of Kings, Most August Caesar and Basileus and Autocrator of Constantinople and New Rome. The whole City was shaken by an unending, ear-splitting roar. Entwined in whorls of incense, the pillars turned in their sockets, and tears of felicity ran down the mosaic Virgin’s and the cold ikons’ cheeks....
Leaning forward urgently, Strati crossed himself. “Holy Virgin and all the Saints!” he said. “I was never in a worse situation! It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, the mast and the rudder were broken, the bung was lost, and the waves were the size of a house. There I was, on all fours in the bilge water, baling for life, in the Straits between the Elaphonisi and Cape Malea!...”
...the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clamour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith.... The rain had turned to hail, the wind had risen to a scream; the boat had broken and sunk and, through the ink-black storm, Strati was swimming for life towards the thunderous rocks of Laconia....
...The bottle was empty....
The schoolmaster’s shadow darkened the doorway. “You’d better hurry,” he said, “the caique for Areopolis is just leaving.” We all rose to our feet, upsetting, in our farewells, a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.
[1] I have been to Coroni since, and I now own one of these stupendous vessels. “We build them bit by bit from the bottom,” the potter said, “just as a swallow builds its nest.”
[2] The Traveller’s Tree (John Murray), pp. 145–9.
[3] Oi Nyklianoi. D. Dimitrakos-Messisklis. This is invaluable to anyone who is interested in these regions and can read Greek.
[4] There is nothing unusual in this. Many Greek names have changed over and over again, and the majority of them derive from paratsoúklia, or nicknames, as indeed have most names elsewhere in some degree. It may seem odd that these possible Palaeologi, all else being lost, should not have clung to the one imperial heirloom—their name—which still remained to them. But the same phenomenon occurs elsewhere in Greece. e.g. Byzantine names in Crete, like Skordyli and Kallergi (the followers of Nicephorus Phocas), or Venetian ones, like Morosini, Cornaro or Dandolo, survive in large numbers; but many of their bearers have allowed them to be replaced, even in recent generations, by nicknames which have stuck. There is the same random survival and erasure of great Frankish feudal names—i.e., of the Ghisi, the Giustiniani and the Sanudo, names which appear over shops—in the Cyclades. In Crete, nevertheless, in spite of these changes, their descendants have an unrationalized but very definite awareness of their august origins, and in one or two of the large mountain villages where traditions are strongest—Lakkoi in the White Mountains, for instance, and Anoyeia on the slopes of Mt. Ida—the mountaineers, though they may have only half a dozen goats to their name, possess a tribal pride and a knowledge of the part played by each family in Crete’s innumerable rebellions against the Turks and a feeling of hierarchy and Ebenbürtigkeit among themselves which is almost Proustian in its intensity. Every shepherd, though he may be unable to read or write, carries a mountain Gotha in his head. I was fascinated, a few years ago, by the quantity of coats-of-arms above scrolls bearing Cretan names which may be encountered by any sheepfold, on the walls, among those of other distinguished alumni, of the University of Padua; placed there when Padua, like Crete till 1669, was a part of the Venetian republic. In Crete itself, these insignia have vanished without trace.